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Senegal for verdant farmland, and then
came back to Mauritania in the dry sea-
son. In the early seventies, his family set-
tled in a village called Jidrel Mohguen,
where his mother sold seeds, animal
skins, and traditional mats in the mar-
ket. His father had grown old and
stopped working. His mother’s first
two sons were blind, and she prayed for
another son until, nine children later,
she had Abeid; he was the twelfth of
thirteen. His mother nicknamed him
Aïnine el Iyil, which means “the eyes of
the boys,” and his parents cherished
him. “I’m the first one who went to
school in my family,” he told me.
Abeid’s childhood friend Hamady
Lehbouss, a teacher and an activist with
IRA, described him as a normal boy—in-
terested in sports, music, and girls—but
also unusually fearless and increasingly
aware of the country’s inequities. Their
village had a half-dozen Beydane fami-
lies and dozens of Haratin families.
Beydanes owned the land, and Abeid’s
parents and their neighbors farmed it
and turned over a portion of the harvest.
He heard his parents talk about how the
local administration favored the Bey-
danes. “Our village was divided into two
parts, like apartheid,” he said. “ That is
when I started to see what discrimina-
tion was.” W hen escaped slaves reached
Abeid’s village, they stayed with his
family. His mother fed and clothed
them, and their children began to say
that she was their mother. Abeid pitied
the former slaves. At school, he watched
as Beydane children went blameless
after fights with black classmates, while
the headmaster punished the black stu-
dents. “I started to ask my dad questions
about the discrimination I saw in the
village,” he recalled. “ That ’s when he
told me his story.”
When Abeid was eight, his father
told him that he had been born to a
slave, and was therefore supposed to be
a slave, too. But, while his mother was
pregnant, her master had fallen ill, and,
heeding the Koranic idea that acts of
benevolence will be rewarded, had re-
leased him from slavery before he was
born. As a young man, Abeid’s father
crossed the river to work for a time in
Senegal, where he felt free from racial
discrimination. Back in Mauritania, he
met and married a woman who was a
slave, and they had two sons. Full of
pride, he went to his wife’s master to ask
to take his family to Senegal. The mas-
ter refused. His father went to court, but
the judge said, “ This is his slave—unless
you want to buy her from him.” His fa-
ther did not have enough money, so he
pleaded to at least take his sons, but the
judge refused him again. The French
colonial governor told Abeid’s father
that the dispute fell under Islamic law
and that he could not interfere. De-
feated, the father left his wife and chil-
dren and went back to Senegal. Later,
a friend introduced him to Abeid’s
mother, and they were married.
“My father wanted to have the evi-
dence to oppose slavery,” Abeid told me.
“But he did not have the capacity to con-
vince himself and others intellectually
and spiritually.” Despite the trauma of
losing his first family, he still believed
this was the way Islam had ordained
things to be. Abeid’s secular and reli-
gious education allowed him to ques-
tion more than his father had. “I freed
myself,” he said. He began reading
the teachings of Muhammad, which
seemed to him to be clearly against slav-
ery.Later, he read books of Western phi-
losophy that supported this conviction.
“My problem is not with religion,” he
told me. “It’s with the interpretation of
religion as the origin, the justification,
and the legitimatization of slavery. The
use of Islam, not Islam.”
Abeid told his father that he wanted
to fight back. He wrote manifestos
about the situation of the Haratin and
distributed them around the school in
the morning, before the teachers and
other students arrived. “There was no
other way to inform people,” Lehbouss
said. Abeid felt that the villagers, white
and black, hated him for questioning
slavery. “I remember the discussions I
Fact Okeowo Mauritania 09_08_14.L [Print].indd 42
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